Certain Kind of Light , livre ebook

Troubador Publishing Ltd - Mary O'Meara

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111 pages

English

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A Certain Kind of Light is the debut novel from Mary O'Meara, following the story of Eileen McCarthy whose life is changed forever by an unusual entrance from the actor, Charlie Gitane. Eileen struggles to cope and to hold herself together as life continues to throw curveballs along her path. In the end, she must surrender to an understanding that there is more to life than we can ever fully comprehend. Eileen had always searched for her 'happy ever after', but the end of her story is very different than what she had expected. She finds that though it does not match up to her original expectations, it does lead to peace and true happiness. A Certain Kind of Light explores the difficulty that Eileen faces in coming to terms with the spiritual awakening that meeting this man triggers and the consequences that this has for her life. A Certain Kind of Light is a book exploring the universal difficulty of comprehending that there is much more to living than we may originally perceive. It is a story about liberation and discovery, with a protagonist who learns to be who she really is in a world that demands the opposite.Shifting between the mundane and the extraordinary, Mary's debut novel explores how an experience can illuminate the ordinary and transform it into something magical. The book has a small, but strong and memorable cast, and is filled with fascinating contrasts between the visible and the invisible, and the factual and the unknown. Mary is inspired by Neil Gaiman and Angela Carter. A Certain Kind of Light is an intriguing and ultimately uplifting book that will appeal to readers of spiritual fiction and magical realism.

Informations

Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	28 mai 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781788031455
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

A Certain Kind of Light

Mary O’Meara
Copyright © 2017 Mary O’Meara

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries
concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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ISBN 9781788031455

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“You must do the thing you cannot do” from “You learn by Living: Eleven keys for a more fulfilling life” by Eleanor Roosevelt. Copyright © 1960 by Eleanor Roosevelt. Copyright renewed by Franklin A. Roosevelt. Reprinted by permission of Harper Collins Publishers.
This book is dedicated to all my soul sisters and soul brothers. Wherever I am and wherever you are, I love you, always.
You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
Forty-Six
Forty-Seven
Forty-Eight
Forty-Nine
Fifty
Fifty-One
One
Today I feel no pain. Not even the dull ache that frequently hovers round my head, presses down on my eyeballs and makes it hurt to look at the splendour of the sun. No pain creeping down my neck and getting knotted up in the muscles and nerve endings from the base of my skull running down my spine. Nothing pinches, nothing jars, nothing hurts !
I’m overjoyed. Can I really be completely fresh? Can I really be as good as new? Could I really be free at last? This is the first day of the rest of my life – without him. As I add that specific I realise it’s not entirely true because he is still there as well as here . But I’ve come to know that he always will be. It’s a bit like on one of those rare days when in full, bustling daylight you suddenly spy the moon loitering in the sky. It shouldn’t really be hanging there like that for all to see – but that’s the thing, it’s always there but not normally visible in that diurnal phase, just as the sun appears to depart at night. Sometimes the pair will align in total opposition, sometimes in perfect sympathy. That’s how it is with him and me. He’s never far away and I don’t need to see him to know that. Still, it’s taken a long, long time for me to be able to unravel myself, to reclaim myself, to know that I am complete without him and I can walk on regardless of where he is.
‘Regardless’ is a very interesting word. It’s not about not caring or being negligent. It simply means to do less looking. To look less at the whats, whens and ifs of his path – and to stop watching that pale, staring-faced clock. I can embrace my life without him playing a part in it. Yes, I can, for decent chunks of time, forget about it, forget about us. Yet, I never forget about what this means to me, what this has done to me, and if that sounds like a victimized comment it most surely isn’t. Yes, it did do something to me, something profound. It made me stronger and braver and more loving than I ever believed I could be. A corny-sounding sound bite, admittedly, but sometimes it takes losing yourself in the chasm of someone else to really find your self . Like I say, it took me a long while and many false starts to reach this point – but from this point, life is suddenly limitless again. Love should never limit you and true love never will. Unconditional love is outer space and out of time, out of mind but deep, deep in the soul. I never thought I’d be standing here, looking out over the summer smog-wrapped city, declaring these things. Never thought this would happen to me. I never thought it would happen to him . All these things happened – or at least through my lens this is what happened, this is how it went.
Two
There was no day one.
Considering this man rocked my world to full capacity, his arrival was like a gentle summer breeze. Somehow, he arrived spiritually before showing up physically. During the August before I headed for the big smoke, I recall him floating magically through my inner world. It was the vivid blue eyes that really stood out, as was so often the case in the years that followed, but at this point of course I’d never even seen his eye colour, not from the back of The Kings Arms in Salford where I first saw him play the role of a Russian composer in a strange student play called Red Square . That was about a year before I moved to London, and though I was impressed with his performance and remember studying his profile in the drama festival programme for longer than normal at the interval, nothing felt particularly strange about this. I also recall staring at his photograph in the programme at home the next day, feeling a curious attraction. Then I put the programme away and largely forgot about it and him.
He popped up again about six months later when I happened to recognise him, playing a minor part in a low-budget film I caught at an indie film festival one weekend in Manchester. And I felt it again: a silent but unmistakable call to pay attention, like the rare occasion when a butterfly or a ladybird lands on your hand. You can’t fail to notice it and feel the tickling sensation on your skin. I was struck by his good looks, those dancing cornflower-blue eyes and the oddly familiar sound of his voice.
From then on he began to occasionally float into my head. It happened a few times, maybe four or five in the space of as many months, and each time, I saw him clearly. I knew who he was but having never met him it seemed a little odd to be thinking of him like this. And I wasn’t really thinking of him. He was just there. Just there in my head with far more presence than many people I saw on a regular basis. I had no idea why he was wafting into my mind as I went about my last few weeks in Manchester.
What I’m describing may sound like daydreaming, film-star fantasising, and I’ve done plenty of that in my time, but there was simply a different frequency when these images drifted in. I never consciously conjured them up; they just unfurled spontaneously and I’d suddenly be aware – Oh, it’s Charlie Gitane, that actor – and a beautiful exuberance expanded my soul. I felt a warm, nameless happiness, as though a peculiar thrill was seeping straight out of these visions into my world, but I barely connected it with him on a personal level – rather, there was a subtle awareness that something exciting was blowing into my life and it involved the move I was making. I didn’t analyse it. I didn’t tell anyone about it.
When I packed my bags, my books, my records, my shoeboxes of memorabilia from my life to date, I also packed a lot of hope in my heart. A non-specific hope, a calm and childlike trust landed in my lap bouncingly, late that summer. There was a journey to be made in a geographical sense. Superficially the purpose was to start my new job, and although that was definitely a good enough reason for me, I also knew it was bigger than that – far, far bigger than that. How different would the night sky look from a London window? What twinkling, enchanting stories could those constellations tell? At no point since childhood had I gone forward with such abandon. I was going. I had to and I was ready to shake hands with my future with a strange lack of clamminess.

Annie is a special friend of mine. We’d already shared a lot and we were about to share a lot more in the semi-sleepless city to which we were headed, and where we knew only a couple of people. I must admit it would have been a lot more daunting without her. I had a strange sense I was supposed to show her something, perhaps even teach her something if that doesn’t sound too arrogant, but it was at the very least equally me that had so much to learn, I rapidly discovered. More to learn than I ever imagined, more to experience, more to witness, more to wrestle with than I knew was possible. Or should I say more to relearn, as at many points throughout my journey I felt I was dismantling the old ways of thinking, collapsing old paradigms, and remembering ancient, buried truths, remembering the innocence and instinct of a child, rather than the pseudo-intelligence and ego-driven progression we are programmed to aspire to as adults.
So, whether I was supposed to show Annie something or not, I’m not entirely sure, but collectively we were meant to show up. We showed up. We witnessed. We gasped. We laughed. We cried. We found it hard to leave once we arrived. It was as though we were small but vital ingredients on a certain mystical menu. Once whisked into that cosmic cauldron it would not relinquish us until the stew had been perfected